As the GOP uneasily contends with rising hostility to Israel among younger right-wing voters, Nate Morris, a 45-year-old Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky who is courting the populist right with an anti-establishment message, emphasizes there is at least one long-standing party axiom he will never abandon: unwavering support for the Jewish state.

Morris, the wealthy founder of a successful waste management company who calls himself a “Trump America-First conservative,” said his commitment to upholding a strong U.S.-Israel alliance extends from his alignment with President Donald Trump’s vision for the Middle East.

“I think he’s been the most pro-Israel president we’ve had in our country’s history, and I want to continue that kind of leadership on the issue in the United States Senate, on behalf of Kentucky and the country,” Morris told Jewish Insider in an interview last Friday during the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit in Las Vegas, where he met privately with members to pitch his campaign to succeed retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Trump, he added, “has gotten it right, and obviously the success speaks for itself.”

But Morris also cited a more personal reason for what he described as his unequivocally pro-Israel worldview, explaining that, as a “proud” evangelical Christian, he has “always believed Israel is the land that was given to the Jews by God.”

“My views on Israel are never going to change,” he pledged. “They’re in my bones. That’s the way I was raised. That’s what my faith teaches me.”

“Look, all our differences here and the different positions that are out there, we’ve got to have more education, we’ve got to have more conversations as a party,” Morris said, without referring to Carlson or Roberts directly. “I want to discuss these things as a party, get on the same page as a party.”

His comments, while hardly unusual in a deeply evangelical state like Kentucky, come at a fraught moment for conservative Christian supporters of Israel, in the immediate wake of Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with the neo-Nazi streamer Nick Fuentes, a source of sustained criticism throughout the RJC’s three-day summit attended by elected officials, conservative activists, media personalities and other political candidates.

But even as Carlson had expressed his disdain for Christian Zionists, claiming they had been seized by a “brain virus,” Morris was relatively cautious when addressing the interview with Fuentes as well as the backlash toward the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank whose president, Kevin Roberts, has continued to stand behind Carlson.

“Look, all our differences here and the different positions that are out there, we’ve got to have more education, we’ve got to have more conversations as a party,” he said diplomatically, without referring to Carlson or Roberts directly. “I want to discuss these things as a party, get on the same page as a party.”

Morris also stressed that “we shouldn’t be in the business of canceling anyone, but educating them and making sure they understand the full context and what’s at stake here.”

“That’s the way we’re going to win as a party,” he said, “and I think that is what’s going to tamp out any differences that we have and that we shouldn’t be having.”

The hesitance to offer a forthright condemnation speaks not only to Carlson’s strong influence in the MAGA movement but also to how his fan base likely overlaps with the right-wing coalition that Morris is hoping to activate in a competitive primary with two more-established rivals. 

Morris, a friend of Vice President JD Vance who launched his campaign in June, is facing Daniel Cameron, the former state attorney general, and Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY), both of whom are strong supporters of Israel. Morris described the race as a “proxy war between Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump,” as the outgoing senator has become one of the most vocal Republican critics of the president in the upper chamber and frequently warns of growing isolationism in the GOP.

Even as he worked as an intern for McConnell early in his career, Morris, who attended graduate school at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs as well as Oxford, has sought to tie his rivals to the retiring senator, arguing that Kentucky voters are “ready for change” and that Congress is in need of “new perspectives.”

To underscore his point, Morris noted that Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, recently hosted an event for his Senate campaign, where Morris got the chance to “hear firsthand a lot of the inside details” about how the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas “came together.”

“What I love about the president is he uses tools of diplomacy, the same tools he uses as a negotiator and as a business leader, and he has applied those to his foreign policy to be able to get things done,” Morris said.

Trump’s approach “shows that when you have outsiders and business people negotiating, you can get great outcomes,” he added. “That’s one of the big reasons why I’m running for the U.S. Senate. I think that we need more people coming from the outside.”

“The thing is, unless you go there and see it, you don’t understand that every day, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Morris told JI. “You’re under constant threat and potential for assault when you live there and when you’re a citizen of Israel.”

He also called Vance, who encouraged him to run for the open seat, a fellow “outsider” who “wasn’t a career politician” before he launched his own bid for Senate in Ohio just a few years ago. Morris said that they had talked about foreign policy “in the context of” their “general worldview,” but did not elaborate. 

Morris was previously a fundraiser for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the libertarian Republican, with whom he traveled to Israel in 2013 on a trip that included evangelical leaders. He said the visit instilled in him a heightened sensitivity to Israel’s ongoing security concerns. (Paul has regularly voted against military aid to Israel and opposed Trump’s attack against Iran’s nuclear program, as part of his overall opposition to foreign aid and military engagement overseas.) 

“The thing is, unless you go there and see it, you don’t understand that every day, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” he told JI. “You’re under constant threat and potential for assault when you live there and when you’re a citizen of Israel.”

The first-time candidate acknowledged waning support for Israel in younger Republican circles, even as he declined to criticize Carlson and others for stoking anti-Israel sentiment on the far right.

He expressed concern about students who posed a series of antisemitic questions to Vance at a recent Turning Point USA campus event, but stopped short of addressing the backlash the vice president subsequently faced for choosing not to challenge the students’ hostile remarks about Jews and Israel. 

While his evangelical faith primarily drives his own support for Israel, Morris said he also believes that “it makes the most sense for the United States,” and skeptical younger conservatives could be persuaded simply on the basis of that argument. “Even looking at it economically,” he said, “I could sell that all day long to any American, to say you’re going to prosper more by this relationship.”

“I think that these are the kind of tools that we can use to get over any hatred, any disagreement — any of the discourse that has been disgusting we’ve seen online,” Morris told JI. “These are the kind of things that can help change hearts and minds.”

President Donald Trump came into office with a promise to make tackling antisemitism a priority of his second term. So far, the focus of that effort has been almost exclusively on addressing left-wing and Islamist antisemitism, primarily tied to anti-Israel extremism — while leaving out antisemitism emerging from the political right. 

Now, a group of staunch Trump allies from within the evangelical Christian community is urging Republicans to also focus on countering what they describe as a growing threat of antisemitism from within their own camp. They see prominent MAGA-aligned figures such as podcast hosts Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens platforming overtly antisemitic views, and worry that those voices — with massive social media followings — could play a role in shaping the direction of the Republican Party.

Last month, an organization called the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel hosted a meeting to discuss the topic at the Family Research Council, a powerful Christian advocacy group. Billed as a “private roundtable for key Christian leaders,” according to the event invitation, it identified right-wing antisemitism as a high-stakes challenge: “It is vital that Christian leaders counter the forces on the right who are demonizing the state of Israel, its leadership and the Jewish people,” stated the invitation, which was obtained by Jewish Insider. 

“We’ve been very concerned about the progressive leftist [antisemitism],” Mario Bramnick, a pastor in South Florida who is the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, told JI on Tuesday. He is also the founder of the Christian Conference, and he organized last month’s event with Luke Moon, the executive director of the Philos Project. “But some of the statements coming out on the right, to me, are possibly more brazen and more troubling and clearly, clearly, do not represent President Trump or his administration,” added Bramnick. 

The meeting was attended by Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, Trump’s nominee to serve as the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, as well as Mark Walker, a former congressman from North Carolina who is Trump’s pick to serve as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. Yair Netanyahu, the eldest son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the group virtually.

“Antisemitism is a bipartisan issue and needs to be condemned anytime, anyplace,” Kaploun told JI. “It is imperative that all parties educate their members about  the  dangers of antisemitism.”

The Christian group is concerned about a small but growing anti-Israel faction within the Republican Party. In a press release on Tuesday, Bramnick called out Carlson and Owens, as well as two figures who remain close to Trump: Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). A Trump administration spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

“It’s almost like we have more of an onus to handle this, because it’s our own camp, our own family. Imagine something goes wrong with someone in your family, you feel more of an obligation,” Bramnick told JI. “Who better than us to be able to handle it?”

Bramnick met last week with Justice Department senior counsel Leo Terrell, the chair of the federal government’s antisemitism task force, to raise the issue of antisemitism on the right. 

“They are clearly on this and following it, from my understanding, and wanting to work with us,” Bramnick said. A spokesperson for Terrell did not respond to a request for comment.

The Conference of Christian Presidents has ties to influential conservative groups in Washington. Hours after the meeting at the Family Research Council, the Conference co-hosted an event on the Trump administration’s policies in the Middle East with the Heritage Foundation. The event featured video remarks from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and a keynote speech by evangelical leader Rev. Johnnie Moore, executive chair of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

Last year, the Heritage Foundation released a policy document focused on antisemitism, called Project Esther, which identified left-wing antisemitism as the main form of antisemitism in the U.S., without mentioning any issues on the right. An inquiry to the authors of the Project Esther report did not garner a response. 

Christians United for Israel, the largest Christian pro-Israel group with more than 10 million members, is not part of the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel. But Sandra Hagee Parker, chair of the CUFI Action Fund, told JI that the organization agrees with the need to combat antisemitism on the right.

“One cannot be a Christian and antisemitic. The two are mutually exclusive,” Parker said in a statement. “Just as liberals must condemn those who use human rights as cover for their Jew-hatred, conservatives must call out those who drape themselves in the flag or the banner of the cross while bastardizing the former and defiling the latter.”  

Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks said antisemitism is “percolating out there at the extreme ends of the far right, well outside of the mainstream of the Republican Party.” 

“I don’t know that it’s growing. It’s gotten a little louder,” he told JI. “Our challenge and our effort going forward is to ensure that it doesn’t take hold in the Republican Party as it did in the Democratic Party.”